10 Great Instagram Tools Every Business Should Know

Instagram is a highly popular photo sharing website which is increasing in popularity every month. With over 300 million monthly active users and over 55 million photos being shared every day, Instagram should be a vital part of your social media marketing strategy.

That’s not all. The number of people who join Instagram increases with every passing day, and soon, Instagram will become a core part of the world’s social media life. Instagram has a huge audience that you can tap into, and is relatively easy to generate interest on.

Luckily, it’s quick and easy to make Instagram a roaring success for your business. There are plenty of tools out there which automate the process of scheduling updates and make chores like editing images and making images “Instagram-friendly,” a simple task.

This guide will take a look at the ten best tools which will enhance your Instagram activity and make Instagram a seamless part of your social media marketing strategy.

All tools mentioned below are free, unless otherwise stated in some cases.

Latergramme allows you to schedule your Instagram posts by giving you phone notifications. All you have to do is upload your desired image through the web or your phone, and then schedule when you want to post the image. Once your scheduled time comes, you will get an instant notification to your phone, which provides a link to posting the image to Instagram.

This is very useful because it gives you instant notifications and takes away the hassle of trying to remember when to post and what the image was. It makes the job of remembering what to post on Instagram very seamless and surprisingly easy.

Onlypult allows you to edit your Instagram images and schedule them to be posted on your business’ Instagram account. It doesn’t just give you a notification to upload the image; it uploads the image to Instagram automatically, at the scheduled time.

Onlypultgives you a variety of options to edit your image including adding captions, applying filters, cropping, rotating, changing brightness/darkness and much more. Once you’ve edited the image, you can schedule it to be uploaded to Instagram for whenever you want.

If by accident, you happen to schedule the wrong image to be uploaded or want to elongate the scheduled time for when the image will be uploaded, you can very easily and quickly delete the scheduled upload

Instapult really strives to make business for Instagram as easy as possible, and it has really struck me as the kind of tool that is always innovating and being innovated. It’s easy to use interface and simple steps makes it a joy to use Instagram for your business.

It’s free to sign up, and you also get a 7 day free trial. After that, it costs $12 a month.

This tool enhances your Instagram experience by curating all images from your feed into a mash up which makes it quick to comment, like and share other Instagram posts. You can also get statistics such as most popular content and number of followers. These statistics give you valuable insights into Instagram marketing such as what works, and what doesn’t—and what makes your followers the most engaged.

Iconosquare also has a wealth of other tools which are sure to enhance your Instagram efforts, such as giving you a full platform to organize and host an Instagram contest.

Canva is a graphic design tool which allows you to create designs for social media, either using images or not. One of the features on Canva gives you the option to create Instagram sized designs which have the optimial size for Instagram sharing. You will also find dozens of fresh Instagram design templates which you can use to quickly make an Instagram design. To change the design, you use the icons, text (in a variety of fonts and colours) and symbols which all make the design more unique and appealing.

Once your design is ready, you can download it and upload to Instagram.

In short, you can manage all your followers on Instagram and target large amounts of people who are interested in your niche and would love receiving updates on your business or website. With over 10 million users, Crowdfire is becoming the go-to tool for managing your Instagram or Twitter followers.

This is literally, the only tool that shows you who has unfollowed you on Instagram

Repost is a mobile app which allows you to repost other Instagram photos (with attribution), where the regular Instagram platform doesn’t allow you to. This makes it quick and simple to repost other people’s content, build relationships and interact with your community.

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What I particularly like about this app is that it makes reposting a seamless experience. I have found that by using this app, many of my followers have actually interacted with me more as a result of me re-posting their photos.

This tool allows you to evaluate your competition’s Instagram accounts such as which photos are their most popular, statistics on their weekly Instagram activity, their followers plus who they’re following. This tool was originally developed for Twitter but it recently expanded by including Instagram and Facebook too.

This tool is exceptionally useful because it gives you access to the biggest influencers in your industry, and shows you what works for them. Since these people work in the same niche as you, it is very easy to see what your target audience is interested in and create images which will highly resonate with them.

Competitive intelligence gives you more insights on what your competitors are doing, and shows to you what works and what doesn’t—in your niche. This tool makes snooping on your competitors simple and very straightforward. Once you see which photos are the most shared, you can try and replicate that success by posting a photo which has the same style or uses a similar approach to their photos.

Over is an iPhone and Android mobile application which allows you to write text on your images, and create beautiful text overlays. This app is perfect for Instagram marketing, because Instagram users adore sharing images with text overlays.

You can get very creative with this tool. Here is a quick sampler of the kinds of text overlays you could create:

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Quotes – Instagram users love sharing motivational and inspiring quotes. Get some quotes that are related to your niche through QuoteBrain or … Then, get some images either through your own camera or with free stock image sites such as Unsplash. Then, upload your desired image to Over and add text with it. You can then upload it to Instagram, and get a ton of shares!

Statistics – Got a surprising statistic that’s sure to shock your followers? Use Over to add a statistic to an image, and upload to Instagram.

Questions – If you want to get Instagram commenting on your profile, the best way to do it is through questions. Ask your followers a simple yet interesting question through overlaying the question’s text on an image. Eg: An icecream company could ask something like, “What’s your favorite icecream flavour?” Use this tactic to do some market research or to find out if your customers have any ideas for new products.

Announcements – If you’ve got some exciting news about your business that you’d like to share, do it by adding the announcement text to an image. Make it exciting and choose a great image!

SocialRank allows you to get exclusive insights into your Instagram followers, such as who your most valuable follower is, what posts your followers are sharing, what interests your followers have, where your followers are located and much more. Basically, it’s an analytics platform for your Instagram followers.

This tool was previously only available for Twitter, but since the userbase of Instagram has grown exponentially over the last year, SocialRank have decided to make their analytics available for Instagram too.

Once you sign up, you can get access to all the stats on your followers, and a variety of other extras such as seeing how your brand matches to your competitors, and filtering your followers by interest, activity and location.

Overall, I think that this tool is a fantastic platform that you can use to see who your followers really are. Behind the number, is an audience of real people. SocialRank will help you to identify with your followers and create Instagram posts that will resonate with them.

Sometimes, the best Instagram photos are collages which comprise of multiple images, all mashed up into a single photo. Making a collage saves time, and spares your followers from receiving multiple images all at once. For example, if your business hosted an event, and you had photos you’d like to share, you could create a collage of the best images of that event. Creating collages brings your Instagram profile to the next level.

The best and easiest way to make collages is with Pic Stitch, a mobile app. This is particularly useful and better than other photo collage makers, because it can be used on the go. When you’re at an event, you can simply use the app to make the collage, and then, upload to Instagram. There’s no fuss, no online editors needed and everything is done in minutes, if not seconds.

7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Goals and Habits Effectively

Now that 2011 is well underway and most people have fallen off the bandwagon when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions (myself included), it’s a good time to step back and take an honest look at our habits and the goals that we want to achieve.

Something that I have learned over the past few years is that if you track something, be it your eating habits, exercise, writing time, work time, etc. you become aware of the reality of the situation. This is why most diet gurus tell you to track what you eat for a week so you have an awareness of the of how you really eat before you start your diet and exercise regimen.

Tracking daily habits and progress towards goals is another way to see reality and create a way for you clearly review what you have accomplished over a set period of time. Tracking helps motivate you too; if I can make a change in my life and do it once a day for a period of time it makes me more apt to keep doing it.

So, if you have some goals and habits in mind that need tracked, all you need is a tracking tool. Today we’ll look at 7 different tools to help you keep track of your habits and goals.

Joe’s Goals

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Joe’s Goals is a web-based tool that allows users to track their habits and goals in an easy to use interface. Users can add as many goals/habits as they want and also check multiple times per day for those “extra productive days”. Something that is unique about Joe’s Goals is the way that you can keep track of negative habits such as eating out, smoking, etc. This can help you visualize the good things that you are doing as well as the negative things that you are doing in your life.

Joe’s Goals is free with a subscription version giving you no ads and the “latest version” for $12 a year.

Daytum

is an in depth way of counting things that you do during the day and then presenting them to you in many different reports and groups. With Daytum you can add several different items to different custom categories such as work, school, home, etc. to keep track of your habits in each focus area of your life.

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Daytum is extremely in depth and there are a ton of settings for users to tweak. There is a free version that is pretty standard, but if you want more features and unlimited items and categories you’ll need Daytum Plus which is $4 a month.

Excel or Numbers

If you are the spreadsheet number cruncher type and the thought of using someone else’s idea of how you should track your habits turns you off, then creating your own Excel/Numbers/Google spreadsheet is the way to go. Not only do you have pretty much limitless ways to view, enter, and manipulate your goal and habit data, but you have complete control over your stuff and can make it private.

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What’s nice about spreadsheets is you can create reports and can customize your views in any way you see fit. Also, by using Dropbox, you can keep your tracker sheets anywhere you have a connection.

Evernote

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I must admit, I am an Evernote junky, mostly because this tool is so ubiquitous. There are several ways you can implement habit/goal tracking with Evernote. You won’t be able to get nifty reports and graphs and such, but you will be able to access your goal tracking anywhere your are, be it iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, or web. With Evernote you pretty much have no excuse for not entering your daily habit and goal information as it is available anywhere.

Evernote is free with a premium version available.

Access or Bento

If you like the idea of creating your own tracker via Excel or Numbers, you may be compelled to get even more creative with database tools like Access for Windows or Bento for Mac. These tools allow you to set up relational databases and even give you the option of setting up custom interfaces to interact with your data. Access is pretty powerful for personal database applications, and using it with other MS products, you can come up with some pretty awesome, in depth analysis and tracking of your habits and goals.

Bento is extremely powerful and user friendly. Also with Bento you can get the iPhone and iPad app to keep your data anywhere you go.

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You can check out Access and the Office Suite here and Bento here.

Analog Bonus: Pen and Paper

All these digital tools are pretty nifty and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but there are some people out there that still swear by a notebook and pen. Just like using spreadsheets or personal databases, pen and paper gives you ultimate freedom and control when it comes to your set up. It also doesn’t lock you into anyone else’s idea of just how you should track your habits.

Conclusion

I can’t necessarily recommend which tool is the best for tracking your personal habits and goals, as all of them have their quirks. What I can do however (yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out) is tell you that the tool to use is whatever works best for you. I personally keep track of my daily habits and personal goals with a combo Evernote for input and then a Google spreadsheet for long-term tracking.

What this all comes down to is not how or what tool you use, but finding what you are comfortable with and then getting busy with creating lasting habits and accomplishing short- and long-term goals.